Recent reviews by the kingpin

while i don't think the game deserves a negative review, there are many problems with TABG that make it difficult to play sometimes, so this is more of a "neutral" review.
the game is fantastic and loads of fun. i've played it on and off since about 2019 and i've had fun each time i do, and it's a nice game to hang out and talk with friends while fragging people.

however, the game's nuances are overshadowed a lot by the volume and size of the problems the game has.

when looking at the current state of the game, it's safe to say i'm a little... disappointed.
some of these issues are smaller, more relating to the community and quality of life, others make the game genuinely less playable.

some examples of more serious issues i've experienced include:
the netcode making picking up items and inventory management buggy and unresponsive
items sometimes not despawning when picked up by other players
hit registration being choppy and feeling unnatural in very close or far range engagements (~15 meters and closer, or ~125 meters and further away)
audio and visual cues of certain things (like getting hit by something) feeling unclear.

while i haven't run into many cheating problems because i'm a newbie, they still happen and some of my more experienced friends have concurred that the anti-cheat does not work well.

i'm not very competitive but some of my friends who are into that stuff played this game a lot back when the leaderboards were around; they thought that removing leaderboards was a silly decision, and i have to agree with that.

the performance... god i don't want to talk about the performance.
i am playing on laptop, but here's the specs.
RTX 3060 6gb VRAM
16gb RAM
AMD Ryzen 7 6800H 8 Core

the "recommended" specs for this game are roughly half of that, and yet in low player lobbies (50 or under) my framerate struggles to hold steadily at 60 past the initial wave of people.
the game struggles a lot more when adding people into the mix; some "hot spot" locations (industry, area 64, factory, actual castle) make my framerate chug down into the 30s and 40s, while when it's nearly empty anywhere near me my framerate is in the hundreds.

some might say "oh well, just lower the graphics. that'll fix things."
i'm already playing with the graphics lower; more specifically with shadow distance 0 and render distance ~850; some of the lowest quality you can set in this game.

while i know many of these issues probably won't get fixed (this game feels like it's getting abandoned), i'm hoping that this review may help bring some people's attention to the problems this game has.

john madden